Saturday, July 20, 2013

Bar, Bar Dekho....

Blogdosts, I am off for a week.... wedding in London, and then on to Rome and Florence to say hello to Michelangelo!

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This appeared in Mumbai Mirror...

Bar, Bar
Dekho….

Damn! One of my biggest regrets is that I
didn’t make it to the notorious Deepa Bar at Vile Parle when it was still
throbbing. Who knows? I might have run into several familiar faces –
ministerlog, MLAs, bureaucrats, municipal corporators, cops… all upright people
and model citizens …. the very people who went purple in the face demanding a
ban on bar girls swaying seductively to dhinchak Bollywood hits, while these
men ogled, gawked, leched and showered notes on them. The point some of our
commentators are missing in this sordid saga is the politics behind the
ban. Who were the patrons? Investors? Black
mailers? Brokers? Pimps and agents of the dancers? They were mostly local
politicians working hand-in-glove with cops and dodgy bar owners. The girls
were a shade better off than sex workers, in that, they were supposed to have a
choice when it came to bedding their admirers. Perhaps, this was so in theory.
But the tragic truth is different. The girls were bullied and bull dozed by the
men who ran the show. They had to pay fat commissions to several go betweens.
Even their tips had to be distributed across the board. As for the money
dancers had to invest in costumes, accessories and make-up, let’s say that took
away another hefty chunk of their earnings. And remember, Not every bar girl
became a Sweety or Tarannum – better known as the Crorepati Dancer.

I was lucky enough to visit Topaz at the
time it was at its hottest. There were approximately ten of us in the group. We
were ushered upstairs and led to our tables. The girls looked intensely bored
and listless. They refused to make eye contact with our group ( no high rollers
here…. just tight fisted honchos) and spent most of their time on the tiny
dance floor gazing at their own reflections in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors
behind the stage. The other tables were occupied by beer guzzling , pot bellied
fellows who could have been 1) small time gangsters 2) big time gangsters 3)
dubious neta types. There was one lone chap weeping into his whiskey and trying
hard to attract the attention of one particular dancer.The waiter I asked, said
the sad sack customer was in love with the girl and came there every evening in
the hope she’d fall in love with him , too. This hopeless love of his cost him
a lot of money. But who can argue with an aashique?

The Topaz girls were top class and bore a strong resemblance to Bollywood stars.
Their dancing skills were superb, and so was their styling. In fact, most of
them were far more attractive than a lot of
successful movie stars. And yet, they were here – gyrating in a garish
bar, being hounded and chased by creepos… and finally rendered jobless by a
nasty piece of legislation. While the heroines they mimicked (and even
surpassed) were up there, earning millions performing the same bump-and-grind
routine on screen.Heroines had respectability even as Item Girls! While the Sweetys
were forced to struggle night after night, and finally rendered kadka by the
very people who exploited them. Some 50 to 60 thousand women lost their
livelihood overnight.

The move against Dance Bars had nothing to
do with public morality. The decision was a vindictive one. It had to do with one set of politicians fixing
upstart rivals. It was about dividing the spoils of this lucrative business.
And playing up to popular sentiments of the time. Political nobodies shot to
fame overnight, posing as upholders
of collective virtue. Ministers
who patronized these bars and hired the dancers for private parties, suddenly
started to talk like saints determined to clean up a dirty city. They forgot
that they had encouraged the dance bar trade in the first place. That some of
the girls ‘belonged’ to them and were their mistresses and ‘keeps’. For eight
years, the Maharashtra Government tried in vain to hoodwink citizens into
believing the biggest problem in the State had to do with a bunch of beautiful ‘things’ ( thank you, Sonia) dancing sensuously in darkened bars. Cops
armed with hockey sticks became a symbol of official oppression. The girls who
could flee and resume abandoned careers did so in Dubai, Singapore, London. The
others starved or turned to prostitution. The broke State lost 3000 crores
worth of revenue.Now the same squeaky clean ministers have egg all over their
faces.The Supreme Court won the war that ought to have been fought by ordinary
Mumbaikars. But Mumbai chose silence. And allowed a hockey stick to subdue its
spirit. Shame!

Glad those lovely ladies have got their
groove back! Can’t wait to go back to Topaz and cheer them on…

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This appeared in Bombay Times....

How I love
the word ‘Doobara’…

There are several desi words that I challenge
anyone to translate accurately. Think about it. Can ‘Bindaas’ or ‘Jhakaas’
survive transliteration? Try it for yourself - sound effects and all. Try doing
the same with ‘Maar dalaa’ as expressed by the matchless Madhuri in ‘Devdas’. What
will you say - “He killed me?” Yuck! That’s the power of our
slang. It conveys far more and is much richer than its Angrezi equivalents.
Take a simple word like ‘Doobara’. To start with, it’s musical. And more
importantly, it has a certain emotive resonance that defies deconstruction .
‘Doobara’ conveys longing and nostalgia. When someone falls in love ‘doobara’
it carries more weight than ‘pehla, pehla pyaar’. When a man turns around to
look at a woman ‘doobara’, it’s a bigger compliment than a one off stare. And when an absconding lover makes
promises of eternal commitment ‘doobara’ – you still fall for it! It’s not just
the repeat value of a pleasant experience… it’s not nostalgia alone… and it
certainly isn’t habit or familiarity that makes ‘doobara’ so irresistible. The
only thing you cannot do ‘doobara’ is die. Which is also why we are so
attracted to and fascinated by death.

Ask
yourself – and be completely honest – what is the one thing in your life you’d
like to indulge in ‘doobara’. The answer
could surprise / shock you.Most young women I spoke to said they would like to give
their first (and most passionate relationship ) a second go. The men were less
forthcoming and generally linked their ‘doobara’ moment to some sport or the
other (bores!).

Interestingly enough, in the world of bhais
and gangsters, there is no such thing called ‘doobara’. And it’s that finality
which makes these men so lethally attractive. The bullet has to find it’s mark
the first time… or else. The woman has to succumb the first time, or else. The
trusted aide has to step aside when asked, or else. Bullets are precious. They
cannot be wasted ‘doobara’. If anything, they have more value than the life of
the poor moll…

Bollywood has an insatiable appetite for
revisiting ‘Bhai-land’. And audiences, too, can’t seem to get enough of that
dangerous decade (‘80’s), when the Bhais called the shots in showbiz, literally
and figuratively. It’s amazing how eccentrically and erratically the film
industry in Mumbai functioned at the time. And how top stars, producers,
directors and starlets were compelled to
play ball with shadowy figures, who were often just sinister voices on
the phone. Despite daily threats, despite hefty extortions, despite kidnappings
and murders, movies got made, and careers flourished. Those untold stories, of
mid-night calls, ransom notes, early morning knocks on the door, and direct orders to comply or face consequences,
need to be chronicled. They are menacing enough to fry brains and freeze blood
even today. And yet, more than three decades down the line, nobody wants to
talk about that sinister era. Such is the fear psychosis. The threats remain
omnipresent and as real as they were back
then. Seniors in Bollywood know better than to mess with these goons. One false
move and it’s back to ‘goli mari bhejey main.’
It is indeed a chilling reality
even today and one must hand it to gutsy Bollywooders who
are willing to take their chances with the D-Gang by basing movies around their
murky lives. They do so knowing that the
hitman’s goli rarely misses its target. It’s a strange sort of inter-dependency – bone-fide, card holding
gangsters feed off the movie industry. And filmwallahs love gangster scripts!
Let’s call it a fatal attraction. But remember – life mein bada chance ek hi milta
hai. Grab it! Because bullets don’t understand ‘Doobara’.

No Bar,Bar Bar Dekho... for this Gujuboy. For some Bar, Bar Bar Dekho, Bibi at home no Bar but not for your highness. With a beautiful, feminine but feisty Sardarni in tow, or more aptly the other way round, any lecherous gaze elsewhere and it will be curtains for the great man! So you lovely lady ( purely platonic ) are off to London. I will be there early next month for a couple of days for the so adorable little Lisa's christening. Lisa is my wife's Goddaughter. Then off to SwissLand. No No, not to deposit any billions. Hop onto the Glacier Express,( just cant get tired of this, the most wonderful work of Swiss engineering), and to the wonderful Zermatt for a week, to try a leisurely climb up the Matterhorn? Will wave a Buon Giorno to Italian Soniaben's country folks just across the border from Zermatt! After all the Italians are our In laws and have a first right to our scarce resources!

I loved your POST."DOBARA".yes NOW A DAYS judges are taking GOD DECISIONS.all dance bar girls are not PROSTITUTES. They got their LIVELYHOOD. GOOD. For UNSEEN pics visit below http://latesttrendzs.blogspot.com

The bars, Shobhaa! Fully agree with you on the basis of the Puranas that we swear upon.

Any of the idiot culture vultures can answer these questions:

1. What was the act of Menaka to seduce Vishwmitra - when the Kshatriya turning Brahmin was being pious to a fault? Am I hearing someone saying there was no bar on the dancing girl then and more importantly no bars at all?

2. During the Kannagi era, Kovalan fell for a dancing girl - Madhavi. She was a courtesan ... performing in what is described as a bordello vide a system called the Devadasis. So, why did the righteous prods not prevent this kind of behaviour then? Does anyone have any evidence about liquor not being used in the dance hall?

3. Kunti and Madri delivered six children born of six men, and five of those children married a single woman - who was almost disrobed by her own one-removed brothers-in-law in the open court. Am I going to find anyone who will defend the actions of the elders of the Kuru family who, in my opinion, ogled at the figure of Draupadi pretending to be powerless?

The dance girls fulfill a social and perhaps a physical need. If we are so prudish as a nation, why do we drink at all, why does alcohol generate so much wealth to support some 31% of the national economy and finally, if the males are getting led astray by the girls in the bars, should one presume that the women at home [wife, mother, sister] are as powerless as Bhishma, Guru Drona, the blind Dhritarashtra et al?

Write some more hard hitting stuff, Shobhaa! The culture vultures who seem to have nothing better to do than wring their hands in despair like 108 year old spinsters getting scared about a cockroach cross the pew in a 220 year old church need to be taught a lesson or two in modernity.

An article in The Economisthttp://www.economist.com/news/britain/21582254-indias-super-rich-elite-are-colonising-heart-former-british-empire-passageThese days India’s super-rich elite makes a similar migration, to London. From June to August, when the temperature in Delhi rarely drops below 35 degrees Celsius, wealthy Indians and their wives flock to the former imperial capital—especially to its most exclusive quarter, Mayfair.

"...Speak Gujju, think Gujju, act Gujju.That’s the Modi brand."Simple and elegant substitution of communalism with regionalism.I would also like to know your views about English (and Hindi and Gujju) of Mr. Vladimir Putin or Mr. Hu Jintao.

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